


Talk to the Tail

by Grimalkin



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Body Language, Fluff, Gen, Jester is a good friend, Molly may or may not have smack himself with his own tail in the past, Molly wasn't raised by teiflings, Tieflings, lowkey basing teifling tail body language on cat tail body language but its not a hard rule
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-30
Updated: 2018-09-30
Packaged: 2019-07-20 22:49:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,238
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16147193
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Grimalkin/pseuds/Grimalkin
Summary: Mollymauk realizes that Jester has several orders of magnitude more coordination over her tail then he does. She doesn't accidentally knock shit over with her tail every other day, either.He decides to talk to her about that, and Jester is more than happy to deliver some tail-related wisdom.





	Talk to the Tail

**Author's Note:**

> I didnt edit this at all lmao

“Jester, can I ask you something?”

Jester glanced up from some of her sketches, upon the… kinda constipated looking face of Mollymauk. At least she thought he looked constipated. She didn’t think she had ever seen Molly with the shits before.

“What kind of something?” She asked, raising an eyebrow.

Molly took in a deep breath, and sat down at the table across from her, and blew the air back out in a long huff. It wasn’t terribly easy to tell, with the way that Molly’s eyes were, but she could see he was glancing around the room at anything other than her. Eventually she felt his eyes rest on her Journal.

“Whatcha drawing?” He asked a little too quickly. Jester felt a small bubble of joy rise up in her chest, but unlike usual when someone asked about her drawings, it came accompanied with a little twinge of embarrassment. 

“Not much, just doodling.” She sighed, sliding her journal over to him so he could get a better look. “I’m kinda feeling art blocked to be honest, so I just drew a bunch of stuff I’ve already drawn before, but like way cuter.” Jester blew a raspberry. “I like the downtime we get sometimes, but it can also be really hard for inspiration when all you’re doing is sitting around all day, and I can’t exactly draw myself sitting around all day without like, a  _ really _ big mirror for reference or something.”

“You should look into one then.” Molly commented idly, staring down at her journal, flipping between pages. From over his shoulder she could see his tail, wiggling like seaweed in the water with the tip hooked back down.

Since the day she first met him, Jester had always thought Molly’s tail was strangely emotive. Watching any tiefling’s tail could tell you quite a bit about how they were feeling, provided you knew the tells like she did., But it’s something you sorta had to watch for a while to get a good feel for, since most tieflings will have their tail doing other shit, or just simply schooling them to be more neutral. It was like a hidden whisper language known to only a select few-- a far quieter dialect of infernal.

Unless it was Molly. His tail practically shouted his emotions to the room, and you really didn’t need to be an expert (such as herself) to know how he was feeling if you just take a second to look at his tail. 

Molly didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve, he wore it on his tail.

It’s how Jester knew Molly had the  _ biggest _ crush on Caleb. Well, that and the flirting. But his tail somehow felt more obvious than the flirting. 

Anyways, right now, she could see he was nervous, but not like a terribly scared nervous.

“So what did you want to ask me Molly?” Jester said, cradling her cheeks in her hands and leaning on the table with her elbows.

Molly looked back up.She watched his tail swish a little bit faster.

He was  _ embarrassed _ . Sure enough, she actually realized his face was just the slightest bit flushed. Jester couldn’t ever remember seeing Molly embarrassed before.

Molly slid the journal back over to her, trying, and failing spectacularly, to cover his nerves with a low chuckle. He clapped his hands together, bringing them up to his lips, and closed his eyes, smiling in spite of himself.

“Gods this is much harder than I’d thought it’d be.” He let out with a breathy chuckle.

“Is is a secret?” Jester tilted her head at him expectantly, leaning in just a bit closer and dropping her voice down to a conspiratorial whisper. “A secret about a wizard?”

“Let’s not talk about that right now.” Molly said with a huff, and gave her a not- _ quite _ -warning look. Jester waggled her eyebrows at him. She scooted in closer, waiting expectantly.

“I’ve noticed,” Molly started slowly, “that you can do... things, with your tail.”

Jester raised an eyebrow. She must have had a look on her face because Molly rolled his eyes at her.

“Regular things.” He said with a smirk, “Honestly, get your mind out of the gutter.”

“You first.”

“Yeah, yeah, pot, kettle.” He sighed. “I mean like, sometimes you use it to tap people on the shoulder, or that one time you used it to trip a guy, and one time I noticed you were actually using it to pet Frumpkin under the table while you were talking to Fjord, and--”

Molly pursed his lips, and glanced over his shoulder to where his tail was starting to lash behind him, and grabbed it.

“And  _ this thing _ is going to get me in trouble one day.” He said, exasperated. “Trouble I actually give a shit about at least. It’s knocked over its fair share of shit in the past, but that’s nothing.” His tail writhed slightly in his grasp, and he shot it a glare, at which point it started to sit still. 

Jester blinked, realization dawning on her. “Molly can you not do those things?” She asked.

Molly opened his mouth like he was about to say no, but seemed to think better of it. He let his tail go, and it stayed where it was, but his eyes never left it, like it was a snake he needed to keep an eye on or else it would bit him.

“I can do a little.” He said eventually. “Mostly just force it to sit still, and even then I need to focus for a bit to get it to do what I actually want, instead of it being a little shit all the time. I can move it.” With a strange sort of sluggishness, his tail ducked back down behind his shoulder, and reappeared on the other. “But for you it seems so… easy. Like moving a limb or something.”

“I mean,” Jester asked, “Isn’t a tail a limb, kinda?”

“I don’t know. Fuck, maybe?” Molly shook his head, running a hand through his hair, and his tail sliding back over his shoulder behind him once more. “Point is, I never really noticed until the two of us started hanging out-- I didn’t really know any other tieflings before you, not really anyways, so I always just figured that they always had a mind of their own. It makes sense right? I mean, cats are like that. But then here you are, and you can practically tie yours in knots without even looking.”

Jester stared at Mollymauk. Without a word, she lifted her tail up so that Molly could definitely see it, and quickly tied it into a loose double knot.

The look on his face was so worth it.

“Oh, fuck off,” Molly said with a smile, “Now you’re just being a showoff.”

Jester laughed, and started to untangle her tail from itself. “I could show you how.”

“Jester.”

“Molly.”

“I can’t even get my tail to make the first loop, let alone knot the damn thing.” Molly groused, shifting uncomfortably in his seat, tapping on the table impatiently. He stopped after a second. “Is it that easy for other tieflings as well?”

Jester tilted her head to the side, scrutinizing. She glanced back down at her journal, and picked up her pencil again, tapping it against the blank space on the page.

“Well, I dunno.” Jester said with a shrug. “My mom was the one who taught me how to do that. She can do  _ four _ knots, cause she’s like super talented. I can actually do three but the third one takes a while for me to do, and it kinda is uncomfortable. You’re really the only other tiefling I’ve talked to it about.”

“Oh. Right, I see.” Molly said, disappointment creeping into his tone. His tail drooped behind him, and jester frowned. Sad moods were a pretty shitty fit for Molly’s face, and right now he just seemed almost resigned, which is a word that should never  _ ever _ be used to describe Mollymauk Tealeaf, if you asked Jester.

“Do you want to learn how?” She asked suddenly, “Not the knots so much as the other stuff. Basic control and all that shit.”

“You can  _ learn _ that?” Molly seemed to perk up, he blinked at her and the corner of his mouth started to curl into a small grin, and the tip of his tail poked back up from behind him, twitching. 

“Well duh! It’s not like I could do everything I can do with it since the moment I was born!” Jester rolled her eyes at him, “I mean I could barely control it at all until I was like… four or some--”

Jester dropper her pencil.

“Oh my gods.” She said, utterly failing to school the grin off her face.

“What?”

“You can’t control your tail because you’re only like two years old!” She said, perhaps a bit  _ too _ loudly, in the mercifully mostly empty tavern. Molly winced and Jester dropped her voice back down to a whisper. “You’re like a  _ toddler _ .”

Molly looked vaguely offended. “I assure you I’m a godsdamn adult, with all the shit I pull.”

“Well yeah but,” Jester waved him off, “You’ve only been an adult for like two years, so you don’t have any of the practice with your tail like you should.”

“I didn’t have to re-learn to use my actual, definite limbs, you realize.” Molly said with a frown.  “Could walk mostly well since day one.”

“Well maybe tails aren’t limbs, but no, no listen it totally makes sense.” Jester leaned in close, grabbing a hold of Molly’s hands. “Your tail is like,  _ all over the place all the time _ . It’s just like a little kid’s. I’ve seen a few tiefling children before and their tails are always super expressive just like yours is.”

“Expressive?” Molly echoed.

“Well yeah. It’s kind of a dead giveaway for when you’re bullshitting too.”

Molly’s eyes widened.”It  _ is _ ? Aha. Well, that’s a relief. I thought I was just genuinely crap at bullshit. Really? Is it that much of a giveaway?”

“You might as well just wear a sign that says ‘I’m a big fat stupid liar’. I’m pretty sure that even people who don’t know anything about how to read tiefling body language can tell.”

“Fuck me.” Molly laughed again, burying his face in one of his hands and shaking his head.

“I mean how did you think I found out you had a crush on Caleb?” Jester asked, having just enough good sense to keep her voice quiet, a devilish grin splitting across her face. “Your tail goes crazy when he talks to you.”

“ _ Fuck me,  _ Gods.” Molly bought the other hand up to bury his face even more, and Jester laughed, and ever a moment, Molly’s muffled laughter joins her own. After a few moments of giggling, the hands drop from Molly’s face and, all that embarrassment, the uncertainty and resignation it’s gone, and replaced with a glow of gratitude, staring down at the table.

“Jester, thank you, I--” He said suddenly and then stops, his mouth hanging open and not quite able to meet her eye. His head snaps back up to look at her and he simply repeats: “Thank you.”

“No problem Molly.” She nods at him once, and then scrunches her face in an over exaggerated approximation of stern. “Now for you first lesson, my young protege…”

“You’re  _ awful _ , really just awful.”

“Shhh!” Jester takes a moment to think trying to fight the grin off her face, but it’s a slowly losing battle of attrition. “Oh, I know!”

She lifts her arms up slightly, and quickly wraps her tail around her midsection. “Can you do this?”

Molly squints at her.

“Can’t say I’ve ever tried, but,” He lifts his arms similarly, and slowly, his tail starts to lazily wind around his midsection, but unlike Jester’s, it more just flops into place and still twitches and shifts near constantly. Molly grunts as his tail barely manages to form a very loose sash around his midsection, and sluggishly starts to  wind around for a second time, but after a series of false starts and other parts of the tail jerking it out of place, Molly drops his arms back to his side with a sigh. “That’s a ‘kind of but not really’, I’d think.”

Jester hummed in agreement.

“I mostly do it so that people don’t accidentally bump into my tail when I’m disguised, but also if some motherfucker tries to grab my tail in a fight or something, it’s good to be able to tuck it in.”

“Any advice then, oh great teacher of the tails?” Molly asked, leaning over the table and propping his head up by a finger.

“Just practice, I guess?” Jester offered a helpless shrug, “I think you just need to get used to it. Maybe you could try lifting some weights with it in the morning so you can get used to it.”

“Do I really look like I have weights? I’m appalled.” 

“Exercise is important Molly.” Jester said seriously, picking her pencil back up.

“So is hedonism.”

“You can do  _ both _ .”

“Oh bull _ shit _ .”

By the end of the night, Jester finally had a proper drawing in her journal for the Traveler; One of herself and Molly, lifting weights together with their tails.

(Her weight was twice the size of his. For accuracy.)

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this instead of working on my other fic or my schoolwork
> 
> I am an idiot yes. But I am an idiot who wrote yall fluff.


End file.
